When you say a cooler/bucket full of fresh RO/DI you do mean mixed with salt to the same salinity as his tank, right? Otherwise you're dropping saltwater organisms on the rock into freshwater and that'll kill quite a bit off. Ideally you can transport the rock in damp newspaper, just take a little tank water out to get the paper wet, wrap the rock in it. That's how they ship it cross country and most of the stuff on it lives. The sand you should be getting enough tank water mixed in when you pull it out that you shouldn't have to worry about it for the little half hour jaunt. If you do put any saltmix/RODI water in either the bucket or the cooler, you'll have to make sure you match salinity, pH, and temp to his water to minimize die off, but like I said, I don't think you need to go that far.
The airstone he may have just had running in a chamber, or if he had the biocube skimmer I think that's airstone driven. If it's not part of the skimmer and is just seperate, you don't need it.
I did the nanotuner 4.36W hood upgrade. It's pretty simple if you watch the videos for it. There was one spot in the video where they forget to tell you one step, which means you have to undo a connection to fix it, but if you do a search on google someone tells you exactly where it is (I don't remember offhand).
When you get around to stocking your CUC, give John a call over at reefcleaners.org, you can have him set you up a custom package, or just buy their prebuilt 30g package which is what I did.